


weakness (half agony, half hope)

by dust_and_gold



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/M, Fate, Fluff, Heartbreak, Jane Austen - Freeform, Love is Weakness, Persuasion - Freeform, References to Jane Austen, Road Trips, Second Chances, clarke stop taking advice from lexa, loose retelling of persuasion, they don't sing songs about the ones that come easy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 21:59:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3304889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dust_and_gold/pseuds/dust_and_gold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He presses her into the stucco wall and kisses her like he meant to do that all along. She loops her arms around his neck and wonders how long she can manage to stay there."</p>
<p>In a loose AU retelling of Persuasion, Clarke and Bellamy meet while road tripping and fall in mad, crazy, rip-your-heart-out love. But then Clarke refuses him. She goes to school, he enlists, and they sever all ties. Until fate brings them back together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	weakness (half agony, half hope)

Clarke and Bellamy meet halfway through Clarke’s gap year.

Clarke spent the first five months of it shadowing her mom at the hospital instead of building orphanages on the Burmese border like she'd wanted. Clarke is already tired of hospitals, which is probably a bad sign, since she’s six months away from starting premed at Johns Hopkins.

The day Clarke’s internship expires, Raven drags her to the curb and heaves a duffel full of Clarke’s clothes into the trunk of Raven’s beat-up, souped-up, well-loved Chevy. Says they’re going on a road trip, and Clarke can like it or lump it. Clarke is a girl of maps and plans and wants to know _where, when, how_. Raven pries the battery out of Clarke’s phone and tosses that into the trunk as well. Says that this is the time in Clarke’s life where she’s supposed to breathe, and damn it, she needs to start _breathing_ already.

The wintry D.C. air slices into Clarke’s lungs, but she breathes in anyway.

They flee the cold, arcing west along the bottom of the US. They’ve never seen the Pacific, so they point their headlights toward the ocean like it’s the North Star. Their world becomes an Instagram blur of bluegrass festivals, small towns, gas stations, and night-drenched highways. They meet people at rest stops and campgrounds, some of them smiling and unwashed and buzzed on youth, some of them just unwashed, and all of them gone by the next day.

It’s not until the doldrums of west Texas that they meet anyone that sticks.

She sees him for the first time from the back, long lines and broad shoulders, a mess of dark curls and a t-shirt ragged with holes. He’s leaning his elbows on the counter, talking in a low voice to the gas station mechanic, and she can feel the tension rippling off him from the other side of the room. He’s arguing about the price of repairs. Bellamy is low on money, and the mechanic is low on sympathy.

Clarke offers to pay and earns herself a withering Blake stare that scorches her skin from head to toe. She’s never been looked at like that, and it should be awful—it should make her melt into the oil-streaked floor in shame—but instead it lifts her up in a challenge. He calls her “Princess”, a derisive epithet that prickles, but she lifts her chin and snipes back at him. And it’s a strangely impassioned argument for two total strangers, him looming over her, her hands in tight fists, but for a second Clarke truly feels like she’s breathing.

By the time Clarke and Bellamy stomp out of the mechanic’s, Raven is already shoulder deep in the hood of Bellamy’s car, twisting her tools with the precision of a surgeon until it stops making that god awful choking sound. Bellamy’s younger sister and road trip partner, Octavia, is so grateful that she treats them to dinner at the local diner. Her boyfriend, Lincoln, asks Clarke and Raven where they’re headed, and they answer, “Ocean. Sunshine. Beach.” Octavia crows because Santa Monica is the end of the line for them, too. “Route 66, baby!” She begs Clarke and Raven to drive there with them, tells them she’s drowning in testosterone and their two cars could be a kick ass team. Bellamy looks stormy at the mere thought, his jaw clenched tight, so Clarke says yes. Just to see that jaw go tighter.

Every time they’re in a car together, the two of them argue. Somehow the arguing turns into something she craves, and she finds ways to bicker with him about everything. The two of them become captains of the cars and keepers of the maps, in charge of navigation, lodging, breakfast. She teases him about the heaping of sugar he adds to his coffee. He criticizes her bleary-eyed, bedhead, morning self. He even does an impression of her snoring all the way through New Mexico.

They kiss for the first time in Arizona. It’s the middle of the desert night and it’s biting cold. They’ve just left the motel room to find a vending machine when he presses her into the stucco wall and kisses her like he meant to do that all along. She loops her arms around his neck and wonders how long she can manage to stay there.

As the cars meander west, Clarke and Bellamy tumble headfirst into mad, crazy, rip-your-heart-out love.

It makes no sense. Clarke's a future doctor, a GPS kind of girl. She’s eighteen, scant months away from premed at Johns Hopkins. Her future is laid out in front of her in a straight line, and she knows what she wants. What’s expected of her.

But then she finds him, and suddenly it’s like everything she’s ever wanted for herself fades in the face of…well, his _face_ , his crinkle-eyed almost-smile and the sun-brightened gold of his freckled cheeks, the steadiness of his voice and the way he makes her bolder and braver and bloodier.

It makes no sense. Bellamy isn’t on a path like Clarke. The day he turned eighteen, he rescued Octavia from foster care and put his life on hold to keep a roof over her head and a floor beneath her feet. But now Octavia's eighteen and has graduated. A big open space of nothing has opened up in front of him, and he’s drifting sideways.

But then he finds _her_ , and suddenly he feels like he’s on solid ground for the first time in his whole life. When they park the limping, wheezing cars by the Santa Monica Pier (Raven’s car is declared DOA, and she and Clarke make plans to fly back home) and run screaming into the surf, Bellamy sweeps Clarke up in his arms and kisses her until he feels drunk.

Clarke wishes her whole life could be this moment, even while she knows it can't.

Bellamy ruins it all by proposing.

That’s how Clarke would tell it, if she ever talked about it. That Bellamy proposing two weeks after they arrive at the beach slaps reality into her so hard it’s like the Washington winter’s found her again, like she’s not standing ankle deep in a sunset ocean, elbows itching with salt. It’s cruel of her to think of what her surgeon mother would say of the rumple-haired boy with only the hope of a future in his eyes and countless holes in his shirt, but Clarke knows that none of this can happen. What she has with Bellamy is one of those freak whirlwind things, nothing more. She tells herself that her heart is lying to her, that’s it’s _not_ forever. That he’s _not_ her match. That he’s not the only one strong and smart and stupid and fucked up enough to keep her balanced.

But there’s a corner of her brain that wants it.

She calls Lexa. Her cousin is in her second year of Harvard Med and has always been the person Clarke looked to for guidance. Clarke’s whole body is a hurricane after Bellamy’s proposal, a rush of emotions and fears, and she can’t get her brain in any working order. She can’t decide anything. So whatever Lexa says, she’ll do.

Lexa’s horrified. She says that Clarke has Johns Hopskins in her future, while Bellamy’s whole future is a question mark. She reminds Clarke that Clarke _hates_ question marks, that any kind of relationship with Bellamy Blake would be the craziest leap of faith imaginable, and that Clarke is a woman of science. Not faith. And that these doubts Clarke's having right now are a sign of weakness.

So Clarke breaks his heart beneath her heel. She locks her chest up tight, buries it in ice, and flees east into winter. One month later, she flies to Burma to build an orphanage.

Two weeks later, Bellamy enlists.

Four months later, Clarke’s mom helps her move into her dorm.

Six months later, Bellamy ships out.

 

Four years later, fate throws them back together.

 

Fucking fate.


End file.
